TY - JOUR
AU - Muralidharan,Karthik
AU - Sundararaman,Venkatesh
TI - Teacher Performance Pay: Experimental Evidence from India
JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL - No. 15323
PY - 2009
Y2 - September 2009
DO - 10.3386/w15323
UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15323
L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15323.pdf
N1 - Author contact info:
Karthik Muralidharan
Department of Economics, 0508
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093-0508
Tel: 858/534-2425
Fax: 858/534-7040
E-Mail: kamurali@ucsd.edu
Venkatesh Sundararaman
South Asia Human Development Unit
The World Bank
E-Mail: vsundararaman@worldbank.org
AB - Performance pay for teachers is frequently suggested as a way of improving education outcomes in schools, but the theoretical predictions regarding its effectiveness are ambiguous and the empirical evidence to date is limited and mixed. We present results from a randomized evaluation of a teacher incentive program implemented across a large representative sample of government-run rural primary schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The program provided bonus payments to teachers based on the average improvement of their students' test scores in independently administered learning assessments (with a mean bonus of 3% of annual pay). At the end of two years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in control schools by 0.28 and 0.16 standard deviations in math and language tests respectively. They scored significantly higher on "conceptual" as well as "mechanical" components of the tests, suggesting that the gains in test scores represented an actual increase in learning outcomes. Incentive schools also performed better on subjects for which there were no incentives, suggesting positive spillovers. Group and individual incentive schools performed equally well in the first year of the program, but the individual incentive schools outperformed in the second year. Incentive schools performed significantly better than other randomly-chosen schools that received additional schooling inputs of a similar value.
ER -